"Cooperative Care: Empowered Caregiving" is a 40-minute documentary about a home health care coop in Wisconsin. The film explores the philosophy of the group and the daily activities of the CNAs who work there.

Waushara County Director of Human Services Lucy Rowley, obtained a grant from the State of Wisconsin’s Community Links program in 1999 to study the possibility of creating a direct care worker cooperative. “I read about a cooperative of direct care workers out in the Bronx in New York,” said Rowley, “and I asked myself: why couldn’t we do something like that here in Waushara County?”

Last year, in December 2013, my daughter decided to visit Twin Oaks, a long established, egalitarian income sharing community in Louisa, Virginia. Her hope was to find a community that would support her commitment to living sustainably, connecting with the earth on a spiritual level, and supporting her egalitarian cooperative values. Her initial reports were te

(Editor's Note: Steven Dawson was president and founding director of the Industrial Cooperative Association (now the ICA Group) from 1978 through 1988. He is currently president of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI), the nonprofit affiliate of the 1600-employee Cooperative Home Care Associates - the largest worker cooperative in the U.S.

Past issues of GEO have reported on the emergence of a particular type of worker cooperative, the home care cooperative. In the 1980s, the federal government followed the lead of state governments like Wisconsin and acknowledged that elderly and disabled people who need help in day-to-day living are best served by in-home assistance. Medicare and Medicaid funding that would have otherwise been used only for nursing homes would now be applicable to home care services.